Advantages

Disadvantages

Lots of uses for these cards, and very reasonably priced

I buy a lot of Orchard Toys games, both for in the classroom and for little miss. They tend to be educational, easy to understand and good quality.

These cards are part of the early years range which are specially designed to develop early learning skills.

These cards are recommended for ages 3-6, which I do think is an appropriate recommendation because of the shapes shown on the cards.

The shape snap cards do conform to British Standards and are made from a minimum of 75% recycled cardboard.

There are 48 large rectangular playing card style, just the right size for small hands to hold. There are 4 cards for each shape, so 12 shapes are depicted- oval (rugby player jumping on a ball), cube (child opening a present),pentagon (queen wearing a crown), rectangle (picture frame), diamond (kite), hexagon (honeycomb),semi circle (umbrella),cone (wizard's hat), star (owl and night sky), square (windows in a house), circle (ball) and triangle (sails on a boat).

Each card has a bright picture using mainly primary colours and at the bottom of the card has the name of the shape and shows a picture of the shape itself.

It is recommended that the cards can be used to simply talk about and learn the shape names, and as the child becomes familiar with the shape names, they can be encouraged to count the number of the same shape on each card (eg how many triangles can you see?).

A game of snap can also be played with 2-4 players, with the object of the game being to collect all of the cards.

PRICE AND AVAILABILITY

These cost £4.00 and are available from the website, www.orchardtoys.com.

The games can also be purchased from good toy shops but I usually buy them direct from the catalogue, which can be requested online. This is a good way to have a browse and decide exactly what you want.

OTHER PRODUCTS

At The StableTummy AcheBig Racing CarWhat A PerformanceFind The RhymeWhat A performance

Lots and lots of jigsaws and games- if you are looking for something educational, the site is worth checking out.

WHAT I THINK

As I said, these cards are one game out of a collection of Orchard Toys products I have purchased over the years.

The cards have links with the Early Learning Goals and I use them for counting and sorting with very young children- takes them up to the number 48 if they can get there!

They are a good quality product which are designed to appeal to children, with the bright colours and easy to learn game.

One thing I would point out at this stage is that it would be useful to have them laminated as they quickly become tatty after having been handled on a number of occasions.

I have found these most useful for learning shape names and little miss likes to just copy the words and draw the pictures as she is at the "writing stage" and likes to copy these because of the bright bold pictures. Depending on the age of the child (ren), then the cards may have to be sorted so that they are shown only the cards relevant to their age group. For example, when little miss was younger, we used only the 2-D shapes and left out shape cards such as semi circle, cone and cube.

As a snap game, the same as with any other snap game, they have limited interest value, because once played a couple of times, then children may not want to play it again.

They are good value, good quality cards, which, if you are looking for a "snap" game, would be a good buy for a young child. I would recommend them, but better still, if you get the chance, borrow them, as they are not something you will be playing every day, for your own sanity if for nothing else!!